Sport Branding Insights

Constantino Stavros, Aaron C.T. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000733907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

In a sporting world dominated by media and money, an understanding of sport branding is an essential skill for any sport manager. Success means being able to 'brand' – and therefore differentiate – a sport club, player, code, or event in a highly competitive entertainment market. For anyone seeking to understand or manage sport, this book offers an immediate and salient insight into the complex and dynamic process of creating a powerful sport brand.

The book explains how a sport brand goes beyond just an identifying badge, reinforced by a name or a logo that helps sport consumers recognise a product or an organisation. It reveals how a brand becomes linked with consumers' opinions and perceptions of a sport product and the organisation that owns it. Readers will learn how to create a powerful brand that has both recognition in the market and strong associated imagery, by imbuing it with a spirit of the past through appeals to tradition, by endowing it with human qualities of emotionality, thought, and volition, and through the use of characters, colours, texts, and symbols. It also provides a brief guide to the new domains of digital sport branding and social media.

Concise, informative, and entertaining, this is an essential resource for anyone exploring or practising the business of sport.

1 Understanding sport brands

Introduction – key concepts

When the renowned professional English football club, Leeds United, announced a change to their club crest in early 2018, it was met with such uproar – including over 77,000 signatures on a petition – that they abandoned the idea within hours of announcing it. The badge, which featured what was termed a ‘Leeds Salute’ (an image of a person placing a clenched fist across their chest), carried associated wording that read ‘celebrating fans at the heart of our community.’ Unfortunately, many of those fans who were being celebrated viewed the new design as ‘awful,’ ‘shocking,’ and ‘horrendous.’¹ What was ostensibly a well-intentioned ‘image’ for the club was met with disdain when revealed, despite the club launching the design in a tweet that boasted of ‘6 months of research’ with ‘10,000 people consulted.’ The image was emotionally visceral to many fans who attach themselves to the club from cradle to grave, and see every branding touchpoint as something sacred. Leeds United subsequently launched a campaign to fan-source a new crest, and quickly received over 1,200 submissions as a result.

A brand, in its simplest form, can be seen as an identifying badge – reinforced, leveraged, amplified, and mobilised by device marks, or the suite of images, words, or logos that help consumers recognise a product or an organisation. As a result, a sport brand becomes intractably linked with consumers’ opinions and perceptions – something that Leeds’ well-meaning management discovered.

A carefully constructed and curated sport brand will do much more than merely provide ready identification. It will urge sport consumers to think of the brand in terms of its relationship to other sport brands, usually competitors, in a marketing process known as positioning. Because branding and positioning are connected, we will later explain how the entire enactment of sport branding must be reflective of a thoughtful positioning strategy. For example, it would be counterproductive to brand a new product as a luxury item when it is positioned in a low-cost category.

Another factor that we need to introduce now is that sport product sales can be affected by how easily a consumer can tell different products apart. Branding takes on a particular importance towards what marketer’s call ‘differentiation,’ or the related concept of ‘distinctiveness,’ because it offers a potent way for products and other brand elements to stand out from all the rest.² Standing out goes well beyond just having a different name, colour scheme, or logo. Branding sport gives consumers a reason to create associations with the brand, which become reinforced over time. Branding is therefore a way of augmenting a product by helping to create associated ideas that make it different in powerful, enduring ways. The added value that a product possesses because of its brand name and identity is called brand equity.³ The concept of equity is critical in branding as it ultimately provides a barometer of success.

All the previous leads to our following definitions. A sport brand is the symbolic representation of everything that a sport enterprise or organisation seeks to stand for, leading to expectations about its value and performance. A brand can be portrayed as an identifying badge that triggers consumers to remember a product or an organisation. It can be a name, a design, a symbol (or logo), an image, or a combination of these things. By extension, sport branding is the process used to help elements and products stand out from the crowd by positioning them through associated ideas and concepts.

Sport marketing

Branding falls under the broader activities of sport marketing, which encompasses all the planning and implementing activities designed to meet the needs or desires of customers. Sport marketing pays attention to the development of a product and to its pricing, promotion, and distribution. It aims to create an exchange, where the customer gives up something (usually money) for a product or service they believe is of equal or greater value. Although the term ‘product’ directly refers to tangible items, it is quite common to use it to represent the entire offering to consumers, including services. Thus, it is conventional to speak of the ‘sport product’ in a global sense as a representative term for all offerings associated with sport, whether in physical form like sport equipment, or as a service such as entertainment. Sport marketing aims to not only entice people to try products or services but also keep them as long-term customers.⁴

For reference, the American Marketing Association defines marketing as ‘… the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’⁵ That is, every marketer is required to focus on the strategic processes an organisation undertakes, or could undertake, to allow it to successfully satisfy the identified wants and/or needs of its target audiences. The motivations, desires, perceptions, and actions of these audiences are critical, as the central tenet of marketing is an exchange. A marketer attempts to bring about a profitable exchange by managing a ‘mix’ of product, promotion, pricing, and distribution elements, which collectively comprise the basic tools of marketing. The concept of ‘mix’ is critically important as it highlights the interconnected and synergistic approach marketing seeks.

Since we are all relentlessly exposed to its effects, the term ‘marketing’ has universal currency, although it may be used in different ways. Marketing is seen by some as the use of advertising, publicity, and personal selling techniques to make consumers aware of a product, or to attract more consumers to buy it. For some, it is all about making a sale.

In reality, sport marketing’s influence has far greater reach than this narrow and mechanistic interpretation suggests. However, we can start with an uncontroversial point in that marketing, in general, is all about satisfying the needs of consumers. Sport marketing, therefore, revolves around meeting the needs of sport consumers, including: people who watch and play sport; download and stream programmes; buy merchandise; collect memorabilia; purchase sports goods such as clothing and shoes; ‘surf’ sport-related websites to find out the latest gossip surrounding their favourite team, player, or event; or even participate in esports.

Sport marketing can be applied across two dimensions. First, it involves the application of marketing concepts to sport products and services, and second, it involves the marketing of non-sport, or tangentially related products, through an association to sport. The first dimension involves the application of general marketing practices to sport-related products and services. The second dimension encompasses the marketing of other consumer and industrial products or services through sport. Sport is therefore first a marketable commodity, and second a platform for other brands to connect to, given its power as a cultural and social medium. This juxtaposition of sport as object and medium is a complicating factor in its marketing, bringing both enormous opportunities and challenges as sporting brands try and offer pure experiences that are inevitably commercialised through a desire to remain competitive and to maximise revenues.

In summary, sport marketing involves the marketing of sport, and marketing through sport. The marketing of sport products and services directly to sport consumers can include sporting equipment, professional competitions, sport events, local club or team advertising, designing publicity stunts to promote athletes, selling season tickets, and developing licensed apparel for sale. Marketing through sport occurs when a non-sport, or tangentially related product, is marketed through an association to sport, like a professional athlete endorsing a breakfast cereal, a financial-services business sponsoring a tennis tournament, or a beer company securing exclusive rights to provide its products at a sporting venue.

Sport marketing to sport branding

Like any form of marketing, sport marketing seeks to fulfil the needs and wants of consumers through the provision of sport services and sport-related products. However, sport marketing deviates from conventional marketing in that it also has the ability to encourage the consumption of non-sport products and services by association. As we noted earlier, sport marketing means both the marketing of sport itself, and the use of sport as a tool to market other products and services. These twin aspects of sport marketing have a material effect on sport brands because branding relies on the successful cultivation of associations.

Well before anything can be sold to a sport consumer, a sport product must secure a place in the mind of that consumer in a favourable way. The process of cultivating such a response lies at the heart of branding, and when a sport brand has grasped a firm place in consumers’ minds, then it may be considered ‘positioned,’ a concept we shall describe in detail shortly. The consequence of successful branding and the acquisition of strong market positioning is not merely a single transaction. Rather, sport marketing reflects the establishment of an ongoing relationship between a sport brand and its users. Such a relationship is an essential part of all branding, allowing communities to form around brands, bringing a multitude of benefits, including loyalty, along with it.⁶

For our purposes, we shall consider sport marketing to be the process of planning how a sport brand is positioned and how the delivery of its products or services is to be implemented in order to establish a relationship between a sport brand and its consumers.

The marketing of sport may appear at first to be similar to general marketing, but the two can diverge. For example, the sport product is often highly inconsistent and unpredictable because it is not possible to predict the outcome of a sporting match or control the quality of play. In many other industries, the failure to guarantee the quality of a product would be disastrous. Another significant difference is that few products can evoke the emotional attachment and personal identification that sport commands. Although such nuances do not necessarily make sport marketing categorically different from general marketing, in order to create a potent sport brand, the unique circumstances of the sport marketplace and its consumers must remain the sovereign concern.⁷ For the most part, a customised sport branding response builds upon the foundation established by what marketers call integrated marketing communications.

Integrated marketing communications

Marketing communication comprises a broad process through which sport brands form shared meanings with their target audiences. Integration is achieved through an array of measures like public relations, sales promotions, personal selling, and advertising, each of which seeks to form part of a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ in the minds of consumers as they put together experiences and knowledge to develop both awareness of a brand and then a specific image of it (or attitude towards it). Every action a brand takes – whether planned or not – sends a message that a potential consumer may use to deduce information.⁸ As a result, the ‘integration’ of messages to consumers proves essential to ensure a synergy in the form of uniformity, consistency, and positive resonance. In order to achieve a branding strategy based on integrated marketing communications, brand managers need to start with an understanding of consumer and fan behaviour.

Consumer and fan behaviour

As we have previously explained, brand associations form the critical core of sport branding as they relate directly to the identification and evaluation process used by fans and consumers. Through experience, sport consumers identify ‘cues’ and formulate learning behaviours to assist in making purchasing decisions. Cues provide a stimulus, which may be thought of as heuristics, or approaches to problem-solving that seek acceptable solutions through a kind of ‘short-cut.’⁹

Heuristics do not need to provide ‘correct’ results, but merely a decision-making process or solution that seems plausible and helpful to a sport consumer. For example, in a blind taste-test of an energy drink, a researcher may place the identical product into two containers but differentiate them with labels suggesting that one is a premium, well-known ‘brand’ associated with an active sport such as snowboarding, while the other is a cheaper unbranded version with no external connections. A consumer in this situation may expect – and then confirm after tasting – that the container with the well-known brand name is superior based on a well-worn heuristic that reminds them that premium brands are usually better quality than cheaper alternatives, or even that the association to snowboarding suggests a positive element, raising it above the other brand.

When moving through a (relatively) rational decision-making process, a consumer typically moves through five stages towards an escalating level of purchasing urgency.¹⁰ These stages will be revisited in more detail later in this book.

1. Category need – this stage of the buying process involves acknowledgement of a discrepancy between an actual and a desired state.
2. Information search – consumers aware of a discrepancy search for solutions, and this may involve mental and/or physical search processes.
3. Evaluation of alternatives – having searched for options, a consumer will then evaluate the alternatives, seeking to prioritise those most suitable based upo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The sport of branding
• 1 Understanding sport brands
• 2 Building sport brands
• 3 Mobilising sport brands
• 4 Leveraging sport brands
• 5 Reinventing sport brands
• Index